Arahmaiani: Burning Country

In the event of bearing witness, you open your eyes, and what do you see? Announcing her entry into the gallery, Arahmaiani kicked off her performance by adding acrylic paint to a seemingly finished set of canvases that make up her installation. As short brushstrokes created a faint, scratchy sound, the chatter in the room died down. Figures of women, accentuated by a halo-like glow tracing their bodies, emerged from the dark background of the canvases. The woman in the left-hand panel screamed, her hands covering her ears and face, as if locked in a state of horror. In the central panel, a woman’s eyes and mouth are covered, alluding to the state of abduction. The emotional intensity contrasted with the calm of a woman and a girl in black niqabs, standing still on the right. A nun, with palms together and tears on her face, joined both sides in the middle. Holding an English translation of the poems that the artist was about to perform in Indonesian, I sat cross-legged among an enthralled audience.

On the floor, a constellation of objects was laid out: a rose, a pair of scissors, two crowbars and a bed of brown rice. While at first glance they seemed to represent everyday life, these visual motifs actually alluded to a ghastly reality. The poems revealed that, in May 1998, the streets were burning in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia. Protesting against Suharto’s authoritarian regime, four students were shot dead.1 The nation’s ongoing militaristic oppression and economic crises left many in the country unmoored and hungry. People burnt down shops and houses, looting for goods and food. As a first-hand witness, Arahmaiani was shaken by the targeted violence and gang rape inflicted upon Chinese minority women. The group of paintings and objects memorialises this incident, and the performance acted as a ritual of grieving. As the artist stood in front of us, eyes closed, she sang her protest poem ‘Tunjukkan Hatimu Padaku’ (‘Show Me Your Heart’): ‘scorched bodies dotted the landscape, I was struck dumb in the courtyard, tears welled up behind my lids’.2

Arahmaiani’s multi-part installation, Burning Country, consists of a set of paintings, sculptures and a performance, which debuted in the Natalie Bell building at Tate Modern, London. Evolving from numerous past iterations, the work has opened itself up to duration and liveliness through its landing here. In the three weeks leading up to the performance, Arahmaiani worked onsite in the galleries, painting canvases, sometimes with audiences present. The morning after the performance, the installation continued to evolve: the seating put in place for the performance was removed, and a sculpture made of matchsticks in the shape of the Indonesian archipelago was positioned directly facing the paintings on the other side of the room. Hovering above the sculpture is a silk white kebaya (traditional clothing for Javanese women), marking the absence of the body.

From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Arahmaiani’s performative actions were largely political interventions, positioning the body as both a site of fragility, vulnerable to violation, and a ground for protest.3 The focal point of this particular performance shifted away from the body as an individual to something more collective, through sonic encounters – sound being an affective vehicle that can bring people together in a space.

Tapping rhythmically on a hand drum, Arahmaiani hummed her poems in the tune of a devotional song. In a measured, low pitch, her voice was punctuated by soft drumbeats and airy breath. A gamelan drummer and violinist joined shortly after. Mediated by the grounding energy of the drum’s beat, the gamelan offered resonant percussion, its subtle, sporadic tones akin to crackling woodfire. Conversely, the violin introduced a raspy edge, weaving tension into the soundscape. The sonic dissonance drew the room into a state of closeness, rather than distance; a teetering of push and pull, restraint and eruption; embodied testament to the principle of ‘Bhinneka Tunggal Ika’ (Unity in Diversity).4

In the event of bearing witness, you close your eyes, and what do you hear? Often, we register the meanings implied by a sound, rather than the sound itself. Our attention during the performance was captured by the delayed grief, the atrocities described by the spoken words, and the many pasts and futures that haunt our imaginaries of suffering. What we fail to hear are the rhythm, pace, pauses, the subtle variations in vibrato, vocal timbre and pace that carry along with the words; dimensions of sound that unfold in real time. These elements awaken the shared sense of sorrow that we feel in our bodies, even without directly witnessing the trauma. Here, the affective power of Burning Country lies in the immediacy and directness of its sound.

The sonic collaboration left the room with a deep sense of lament. Burning Country evokes a sense of jeopardy that is imposed not just on the body, but on the land. In a conversation with curators Rosalie Doubal and Dina Akhmadeeva following the performance, Arahmaiani explained that the meaning of Burning Country is two-fold. It refers to the arson in the 1998 tragedy, as well as the burning of the forests across the Indonesian Archipelago: ‘When they cut down forests to turn them into [gold] mining or power plantation’, Arahmaiani said, ‘they don’t want to spend money to pay people to cut down the trees, they just burn them down.’5 Decrying those in power who enact this capitalist extractivism, Arahmaiani further pointed to the displacement of Indigenous forest communities. Here, I recall her earlier performance: the song was one of ecological grief, sung with the spectre of the human and non-human lives that were violently displaced and then blithely obfuscated.

This sense of loss, and the following urgency, is carried into the materiality of the work. The sculpture of the Indonesian archipelago, constructed from matchsticks, serves as a direct and poignant allusion to the rampant burning of forests across the archipelago. Delineating the contours of the body, the kebaya was intentionally suspended at a low height, marking out the proximity of the space in between. This juxtaposition intensifies the awareness of the parallel violences inflicted upon the land and the human body and, therefore, our shared vulnerabilities.

In the event of bearing witness, how do we see and hear, and on what grounds? In his critique of colonial temporality, sociology professor Rolando Vázquez reveals the tension in institutions representing past sufferings. He argues that the Western, institutional gaze reduces the past to a ‘proper place’, a frozen moment in time that comes with presumed knowledge. As a result, memory is historicised as a ‘discipline’, closed to contemporaneity and live encounters.6 In the context of Burning Country, the 1998 tragedy is subjected to becoming immobilised in a state of pure victimhood, calling for perpetual cycles of mourning. So, where do the tensions lie when the act of grieving takes place as a live and durational work in an institution such as Tate Modern?

For Arahmaiani, sound is a repository for living knowledge, carrying intergenerational wisdom from the Ibu Pertiwi (Mother Earth). By attending to the sound itself, rather than its associated meanings, Burning Country liberates the past from the Western, institutional gaze by creating a shared space of emotive affects. It posits an alternative mode of learning, one that allows the past to be ‘an open realm of experience’ that holds speculative and generative potential.7 As the artist said to me in an interview, sound ‘is a knowledge that we need to learn because it has an impact on us. It stimulates our imagination and fantasy’.8 And what is the power of imagination, if not to exercise the capacity to empower and take action?

To suggest that Burning Country is merely a piece of mourning, however, does not sufficiently do justice to the potency of the work and the impulses that gave rise to it. With the work’s first iteration in 1998, Arahmaiani began a life-long dedication to activism in transnational community-based projects, connecting people and places in her fight for social and environmental justice. In this sense, Burning Country is as much an homage to connectivity as it is to jeopardy, to revelation as it is to rebellion.

In the conversation with the curators, Arahmaiani described her upbringing as a Muslim woman in the Indonesian archipelago. Growing up in an interreligious and intercultural society allowed her to absorb different cultures and ideas from a young age. She told the story of moving to Sydney out of fear of political prosecution after she was released from prison for a performance in 1983. From then on, she has led a migratory life in Thailand, Germany and the Tibetan Plateau, to name a few. While Arahmaiani still considers Yogyakarta her home, she wanders beyond borders, resistant to any fixed forms of sovereignty and state control.

After many departures and arrivals, she has found herself as a mediator, a ‘stimulator for creativity’. The notion of connectivity in ‘Sangha’, the word for ‘community’ in Buddhist tradition, holds weight for Arahmaiani.9 Her endeavour to connect communities around the world attests to more-than-human thinking. ‘We live on this planet connected to nature and others, even other beings’, Arahmaiani explained. ‘Please remember that.’10

With the burning fires of the past continuing to rage, this iteration of Burning Country reinvents itself in the present. Arahmaiani’s protests against violence and her life of activism offer a timely reckoning: in the event of bearing witness, we must mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.